Detail from "The Resurrection" by Piero della Francesca (c. 1460).
Faith, Resurrection, and The Dimensions
of Heaven | Thomas M. Doran | CWR blog
Honest science and reason, seasoned with a healthy does of humility, are never adversaries to faith.
The Resurrection stories are replete with people failing to recognize Jesus until he says or does something evocative, puzzling even serious Christians. Skeptics use these appearances to suggest that Resurrection witnesses succumbed to a kind of transference, seeming to recognize Jesus in one of his followers, or succumbed to a wish-fulfilling delusion.
Christians counter that if skeptics were correct, why would the chroniclers of the Gospels have admitted that these Resurrection witnesses did not immediately recognize the risen Christ? Why not sanitize the Resurrection stories to delete this inconvenient fact?
Understanding the Resurrection is beyond human comprehension, and Christians believe that getting their minds around it completely is of little importance in relation to conforming themselves entirely to Christ. Still, is there a way, a coherent explanation if you will, that might give us some insight, however feeble, into how a person could be unrecognizable while remaining the same person, how a person could move through locked doors, how a person could be transported instantaneously from place to place?
Newtonian physics made no allowances for a Resurrection event in which person might move at will across time and space, in which he might – while remaining substantial – pass through closed doors, in which he might be the same person who multiplied the loaves and changed water into wine, while not being immediately recognizable to his closest disciples. Such a Jesus was ghostly or allegorical from the perspective of Newtonian science.
A clue to an explanation for how these appearances might be reconciled with science and reason can be found in the 1884 book, Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions, by the mathematician and theologian, Edwin A. Abbott, who uses the example of “flat” creatures that live in only two dimensions (length and width) on a plane, or on the surface of a sheet of paper, for example.
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